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Android Trojan warns you to stop being a 'pirate'
AN ANDROID TROJAN is disguised as an app on filesharing websites, and when downloaded it gives you a telling off about downloading 'pirated' software.
Android.Walkinwat presents itself as a version of Walk and Text, which you can buy legally from the Android Market. But this version (1.3.7) is fake, and is found on several famous - or infamous depending on your point of view - filesharing websites.
Insecurity firm Symantec said that if you run the app on your smartphone, you are presented with a dialog box that gives the appearance that the app is being compromised or cracked. What it's actually doing is sending private data like your name, IMEI and phone number back to an external server.
It will then send out an SMS message to all your contacts saying, "Hey, just downloaded a pirated app off the Internet, Walk and Text for Android. I'm stupid and cheap, it cost only one buck. Don't steal like I did!"
The app then finishes up by leaving a final message saying, "We really hope you learned something from this. Check your phone bill. Oh, and don't forget to buy the app from the Market." It then offers you a link where you can buy Walk and Text legally.
Considering that the app accesses your private data and you don't know where it's going, this should be considered as a threat. Then again, you could make an argument that the dodgy app sends a message to anybody who sticks it on their phone that downloading anything from untrusted sources isn't the wisest thing to do. µ
Tags: Software
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... copying a program and committing a copyright infringement is a civil matter. Illegally accessing someone's data and hacking their phone is a criminal matter, so if this was a software author, he's probably got himself into more trouble.
Just because Person A does something wrong, it doesn't give Person B the right to do something even worse and justify it by pointing at the (lesser) wrong done be the Person A.
As a shareware author I find this rather amusing. Unfortunately it's certainly illegal in most countries... But then so is downloading pirate software.
I wonder which law trumps which?
Walking down dark alleys is dangerous too and should be discouraged: that's why I kill. To send a message. No charge, however.
This seems to me to be clearly an illegal program, with or without a spurious cloak of moral education, and ent°rely reprehensible. I don't know what "Walk and Text" is, by the way, but I hope that its owner doesn't deserve this and has nothing to do with it - in which case it blackens their name by association. And if they -did- do this, then they are very, very stupid, and very very wrong, and shouldn't be allowed to sell software any more.
Mind you, Sony got away with rootkitting PCs, using trojan-horse software on their Music CDs. Evildoing is evildoing, on a small or large scale.